Dexterity-enhanced telerobotic microsurgery

A telerobotic platform developed in a collaboration between NASA-JPL and MicroDexterity Systems, Inc (MDS) is described in this paper. The lightweight, compact 6 dof master-slave system is precise to better than 10 microns and can cover a workspace greater than 400 cubic centimeters. Current capabilities of the system include manual position control with augmented shared control modes and automatic modes of control of the robot. Simulated force feedback on the master device has been implemented and plans are to integrate force reflection from the slave end effector and evaluate the performance improvements enabled by the telerobot in simulated microsurgical tasks. The telerobot was used in a recent demonstration of a simulated eye microsurgical procedure.